The winners of auctions for pubic-private partnership contracts, especially for major infrastructure projects such as highways, often enter financial distress, requiring the concession to be reallocated or renegotiated. We build a simple model to identify the causes and consequences of such...

In this paper we examine a database assembled from an Australian public register of 553 merger decisions taken between March 2004 and July 2008. Mergers may be accepted without public assessment, accepted in conjunction with publication of a Public Competition Assessment, or rejected. We...

We undertake an analysis of regulatory consistency using a database of publicly available regulatory decisions in Australia. We propose a simple exploratory model which allows us to test for regulatory consistency across jurisdictions and industries without detailed knowledge of the regulatory...

This paper develops an empirical strategy to measure maverick-like behaviour. It applies the strategy to a dataset that contains interest rates charged by mortgage providers in Australia from January 2003 to October 2006. The Reserve Bank of Australia raised its cash rate five times in this...

We assemble a database consisting of 52 regulatory decisions made by seven different regulators across five different industries. We examine how the proportion of firms' revenue requirements that were disallowed by the regulator vary by regulator, industry and time. Despite the differences in...

This paper formally examines the implications of a utility’s diversification into an unregulated industry. In our framework, the utility is the most efficient provider in the unregulated industry (up to a particular capacity) and, as such, there is no question about the desirability of...

The winners of auctions for PPP contracts, especially for major infrastructure projects such as highways, often enter financial distress, requiring the concession to either be re-allocated or re-negotiated. We build a simple model to identify the causes and consequences of such problems. In the...